What is eliciting the most excitement at our house right now? What reduces my girls to squeals of pure kid joy, grins from ear to ear? It's not Santa's impending stopover at our house with his reindeer, or the piles of new-fallen snow...it's a $3 Rudolph chocolate advent calendar from Reny's! I remember thinking the chocolate advent calendar was just about the best thing going when I was a kid too. Every morning Retta wakes up at some ungodly hour when it is still dark out and bellows in her deepest baritone, "ADVENT CHOCOLATES!!! ADVENT CHOCOLATES! ADVENT CALENDAR MOMMY?" At which point I usually concede in a sleepy haze and say, "Yes, you may go in and wake up Rowan and Daddy (who inevitably ends up sleeping on Rowan's floor sometime in the night, reporting for monster/ scary shadows patrol) and eat chocolate. She goes in, rips the calendar off the wall and opens a door that never corresponds with the number of the actual day. She somehow manages to make that small piece of chocolate last for far longer than I would think possible. She starts to eat it, then retrieves a half eaten, melty blob, mushing it in her hands, decorating the walls and everything else she touches with that lovely, greasy brown...and her face, oh her cute little face--totally covered, to the point that I wonder if any of that chocolate actually made it to her stomach. She then proceeds to carry the calendar around for the better part of the day, opening and closing doors, then eventually just ripping them off all together. The thing has been jostled around so much I'm pretty sure all the remaining chocolates have popped out of their spots and are just settled down in the bottom of the calendar. She also manages to sneak about 3 extra chocolates per day, so at best we've only got a couple more days with this thing before she realizes she's all out. It's not going to be pretty. That's when you'll see me at Reny's, frantically trying to find one in the Christmas clearance section in an attempt to appease my little chocolate-fiend's deep-voiced demands for "MORE CHOCOLATE!" I vow to someday buy these for my sweet grandchildren, just as my mother has done for me. And I will sit back and laugh as their mothers wash their faces and the walls at 6 am each morning, marking the days until Christmas.
***Update: Since I wrote this post yesterday afternoon, the calendar has met its demise. This morning she dumped a glass of water in it and after hanging it upside down to dry, she found it again and ripped off all the doors and finished off the chocolates when I wasn't looking. Once it sunk in that this calendar had nothing left to give her, she said, "Rowan's calendar?" and proceeded to march up the stairs in search of her next chocolate conquest.
Last week, on a rainy day with nothing to do, we watched one of our library movies, "Dolphin Tale." Rowan has been telling me how dolphins are her favorite animal now, so I thought she might like this one. It turned out to be a wonderful family movie (like one I could tolerate and even enjoy watching too). It is the story of a boy who finds a dolphin washed up on the beach in Florida with a rope and some sort of trap wrapped around it's tail. He uses his pocket-knife to cut the rope, and some people from a marine mammal hospital arrive and take the dolphin back to their center. The boy visits the dolphin often and they form a special bond. The dolphin, named Winter, has to have it's tail amputated, but eventually they find someone willing to design a prosthetic tail, and she can swim again.
